


burning my bridges at the speed of light

by nirav



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: look at me playing nice with canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-17
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-11-01 17:19:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10926441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirav/pseuds/nirav
Summary: alex considers her father and what it means to be a legacy.





	burning my bridges at the speed of light

**Author's Note:**

> [smallandsundry](https://smallandsundry.tumblr.com/) asked for an alex fic based on the truly excellent rationale song [prodigal son](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pos_zEefS5s) and i, a useless trashpile of alex danvers feelings, had no choice but to oblige.

_i wanna hold counsel with the ghost of my father_  
_tell him I'll be everything he could never be_  
_and if i face the obstacles that he failed to conquer_  
_i'll make it to the other side_

* * *

 

Grief is quiet.

Alex learns early to hold her grief like her guilt: silent and subtle, pressed into her chest, filling the hole that was left with the first choked sob from her mother at the words _lost in the field_.  There’s too much to do-- meals to make, laundry to fold, homework to finish, sister to hold-- for her to have the time or energy to grieve, to cry, to fold in on herself the way her mother has in the wake of her father’s death.

Grief is quiet, but anger is explosive.

It’s been twelve days since her father died and Alex hasn’t cried, her head full of _get Kara to school_ and _Alex, Eliza won’t answer the phone and the funeral director keeps calling_ and _yes, thank you, we absolutely don’t have enough casseroles already_ and her hands shaking at the whispers in the hallways at school.  It’s not new, people staring in the halls, but it’s sharper, sadder, _more_ now that it’s because her father died.

It’s been twelve days and a boy in the hallway is teasing Kara and Alex’s fists go heavy with guilt and grief and she swings, again and again and again, pushing through each punch with her entire body just as she was taught.  

He has a broken nose and a fractured cheekbone.  She has three cracked knuckles and a suspension to carry home with her.  Eliza is still in bed and barely moves when Alex delivers the notice of her suspension.  She looks at the paper and drops it on the bedside table and curls back around the mass of pillows she’d thrown onto Jeremiah’s side of the bed.  

It’s not the first time Alex has been in trouble for fighting, her fists ahead of her words whenever kids in the second grade teased her for her fascination with science, or when they teased someone else in the class for the same reasons and she couldn’t help but see herself in the new victim, alone and unprotected.

“Shouldn’t you have outgrown this by now,” is all she says, voice muffled by the pillows.  Alex flexes her fists, watching as the split skin over her knuckles starts to bleed anew, sinking into the pain from her fractured bones.  Her father had taught her how to punch, years and years ago, holding his palms up to catch her eight-year-old fists, folding her thumb over her fingers and promising to sign her up for karate lessons next week.  It was the first time her parents had been called into the school because she’d gotten in a fight, throwing a wildly uncontrolled punch at the boy who’d been teasing the new girl in the class.  

“You’ve got the biggest heart,” he’d said, ruffling her hair and guiding her hand into a proper fist for the first time.  “But you need to learn to control it.  Karate worked for me when I was your age, when I kept getting into fights.”

She’s just like him, really, fists moving faster than their big brains and bigger hearts, shoulders always squared against threats.  

Grief is quiet.  Anger is not.  Anger is the last thing she has of her father; anger and family and a new gap to fill.

 

* * *

 

The second time her father dies, she collapses.  Her legs give out and she drops down to the forest floor, alone and barely able to pull  air into her lungs because her father just looked her in the eye, back from the dead after half a lifetime, and chose to leave her again.  

There’s no grief to quiet her anger this time around, no guilt, no silence.  She gives herself one night to break and then sinks into her rage, anger fitting neatly around her shoulders and warming her, pushing her, moving her forward.  Cadmus is still out there and her father is part of it, but she can stop them both.  She can stop Cadmus and bring her father home and then-- then-- she can sort out the pieces of her fractured family.

She holds Maggie close and makes her peace with potentially committing treason and sets off to find him, armed to the teeth and ready for a fight.  She doesn’t stop, planting charges and fighting off Cadmus guards until she’s right in the thick of it, staring her father down and listening to his equivocations.

There’s no fire left in him.  No anger.  There’s nothing left of the man who taught her to punch, who taught her to use a telescope, to ride a bike, to care for everyone around her because everyone needs someone to love them.  All that’s left is an empty husk of a person, too focused on his children to care for morality, for other people, for the fact that he’s about to banish thousands of people to the other side of the galaxy.

Alex stares at him and considers Kara, her mother, J’onn, Maggie, Winn.  She beat an imprisoned man recently, out of control and desperate to find her father, unconcerned with consequence or morality when faced with the possibility of losing her family entirely again.  She stares at her father and at Lillian Luthor and considers blowing the building and running with her father, saving him, bringing her family back together.

She sets off the charges and leaves her father behind, sprinting for the ship and the thousands of strangers on board.  By the time Kara has saved them all from disappearing, her father is long gone.

 

* * *

 

Kara lands on her balcony softly, cape fluttering in the wind.  She shuffles into the apartment and Alex waves, barely, from her spot on the couch, knees pulled up to her chest.

“Where’s Maggie?”

“Helping the NCPD get the people Cadmus took back home,” Alex says quietly.  “I thought you had plans with Mon-El tonight.”

“Alex,” Kara says, tight and strained, arms folded tight over her stomach and shoulders too sharp under her uniform.  

“He said he was doing it for us,” Alex says.  She digs her fingers into her legs.  “He was going to send all of those people-- for _us_ \--”

“You stopped it,” Kara says . She disappears out of Alex’s eyeline for a moment, a blur of movement before returning to sit on the couch in a pair of Alex’s sweatpants and a t-shirt.  “We stopped it.  All of those people are safe.”

“I almost didn’t,” Alex says.  She leans into Kara’s shoulder, sinking into the weight of her sister’s arm around her shoulders.

“We wouldn’t have known that we needed to stop the ship if you hadn’t been on it,” Kara says into her hair.  “It’s not your fault you couldn’t shut it down--”

“I almost didn’t try,” Alex interrupts.  “I could have just blown the charges and gotten Dad out of there and-- I almost did.  I almost didn’t even _try_ to save them.”

“Alex,” Kara says softly.  “You made the right choice.  That’s what matters.”

“He did it for us,” Alex says again.  “All of the shitty things he’s done since-- since-- he did it to protect _us_ .  Every shitty thing _I’ve_ done since I was fourteen years old was to protect you.  What’s the difference?”

“The difference is that you chose to run onto a ship that was about to disappear to the other side of the universe,” Kara says.  Her arm tightens over Alex’s shoulders, holding her closer, so hard it aches.  “You had the same choice he did and you didn’t make the same choice.”

“I wanted to.  If it was you instead of him I would have.”

“No,” Kara says firmly.  “You wouldn’t have.”

“You can’t know that,” Alex mumbles into her sister’s shoulder.  “I’ve always been just like him.”

“I know,” Kara says.  She doesn’t clarify what, exactly, she’s agreeing with, and uncertainty settles in Alex’s stomach, like grief and guilt and loyalty, hard and heavy and quiet.

 

* * *

 

There’s still a tombstone in Midvale for Jeremiah Danvers.

“I’ll be right here,” Maggie says softly, hand warm around Alex’s.  It’s enough, barely, to propel Alex out of the car and into the cemetery.  The steps to her father’s grave are familiar, easy, the grass damp from a recent rain and springy under her boots.

She’d come here once a month until she went to graduate school, telling a slab of marble about her studies, about Kara, about how much she missed him, how she wanted to make him proud.  Now she doesn’t sit in front of his tombstone, or speak.  She stands and stares, hands in her pockets, at _Beloved Husband and Father_ , at the date she knows now is a lie.  

“I’m not going to be like you,” she says after long seconds have clicked past, the soft tick of the watch that had once been his counting the minutes until she’s ready to speak.  “I’m going to protect my family, I’m going to keep Kara safe.  That isn’t ever going to change.  But not your way.  I’m not going to sacrifice other people.”

It’s a lie.  It falls flat onto his tombstone and she doesn’t bother trying to make it sound convincing, even to herself, because she would set the world on fire if it would keep Kara safe and she knows it.  She pulls her hands out of her pockets and curls them into loose fists, staring down at the scarred knuckles, the lump at the base of on thumb from a poorly-healed break, the way her hands shake at confronting the ghost of the father she thought she’d known and the pieces of him she’ll never be able to dig out of herself.    

Kara lands at her side with a soft _thud_ , the bright red and blue of her uniform too much for the emptiness of the cemetery.  She doesn’t say anything and instead reaches for Alex’s hand, pulling her fingers out of the fist and tangling them between hers.  She holds tight and stands straight, eyes locked on the tombstone as well, until Alex takes a deep breath that rattles around the uncertainty in her chest and the wavering determination to be more than her father.

It’s a lie, today.  But it won’t always be.  She finally breaks, turning into Kara’s shoulder and crying, loud and shuddering and aching, ten years overdue from _lost in the field_ , from _I did it for you_.  It’s grief and it’s guilt and it’s not quiet, not subtle, not silent.  It’s explosive, for once, and she refuses to hold it close or temper it.

She cries and she grieves and she clings to her sister, to Maggie, to the fact that when she had the same choice as her father she made the right one.  It’s a lie, maybe, to say that she isn’t exactly like him, but she holds onto it anyways, because it won’t be a lie forever and she’ll be more than he was.

* * *

 

_i wanna hold counsel with the ghost of my father_  
_tell him i'll be everything he could never be_  
_and if i tame the anger in me he failed to sunder_  
_i'll make it to the other side_


End file.
